Best of all, unlike a gray card, the White Balance Cap takes no extra room in your gear bag. Just replace your existing lens cap with this one and you’ll always be able to white balance with no additional equipment.

Squeeze the White Balance Lens Cap’s side tabs for easy attachment or removal, even with a lens hood in place. The center pinch-release mechanism prevents it from accidentally being bumped off, while in your bag or shooting in a crowd.

Each White Balance Lens Cap comes with both a neutral and a warm color dome. Pick whichever you prefer and give all your photos perfectly consistent white balance.

Available for lens thread sizes 52mm, 55mm, 58mm, 62mm, 67mm, 72mm and 77mm. (Don’t know your thread size? Just check the outer rim or bottom of your lens for one of these numbers.)

Note: You may look a little silly setting your white balance by taking a photo with your lens cap still on, but the results are worth it. We promise.

Using Manual Focus Lenses on Canon EOS bodies

A common question is whether older manual focus lenses from other manufacturers can be used with a Canon EOS body. The answer is a qualified “yes” in many cases. Of course you don’t get autofocus, nor do you get any sort of focus confirmation. Also, you don’t get any sort of automatic iris operation. In most SLRs, focusing is done at full aperture, and if you stop the lens down to, say, f11, it remains fully open until just before exposure, then it stops down for the exposure and opens up again. This gives a brighter viewfinder image and makes focusing easier and more accurate. When these lenses are mounted on an EOS body, stop down metering must be used. That means that the lens is first focused at full aperture (for maximum accuracy), then manually stopped down to the shooting aperture before the shot is taken. Some people have trouble accurately focusing using the standard EOS viewfinder screen, since it has no focus aids (like a split image center). While some of the higher end models (like the EOS-1 series, the EOS 3 and the EOS A2), so have additional accessory screens with focus aids (e.g. screen Ec-B has a split image center), the consumer level cameras (Rebel, Elan, digital Rebel, 10D, 20D) do not.

Clearly using a manual focus lens is inconvenient, but sometimes it can be worth it if the equivalent EOS lens is expensive, if the manual focus lens is better than any Canon EF or EF-S series lens (rare, but it happens), if you shoot mostly static subjects or if you don’t use the lens very often.

I posted a related link back in March (Pop-up Flash), but I just recently tried it out and found it to be so useful that it was worth reposting:

Harsh, unflattering flash got you down? Grab an old roll of film and make it all better.

Follow Flickr user natuurplaat’s lead, and turn an old film canister into a flash diffuser! A few strategic cuts make it easy to slip the canister onto your pop-up flash, and voila! Soft, beautiful lighting.

Keep reading and we’ll show you how to make your very own little piece of genius.

Awesome article from Photojojo about Flickr tools. Some of these I’ve used personally in the past, but some (like SmartSetr) are welcome new additions that should save a lot of time and energy. Nice!

We loooove Flickr. We want to marry Flickr.

What’s funny about our infatuation, though, is that it involves quite a few other people.

No, no, not like that. We’re talking about the clever developers who have transformed Flickr into the dynamic and lovable photo site that it is. Their creamy vanilla tools and bavarian dark chocolate add-ons are the frosting on the Flickr (cup)cake.

While there are many, many Flickr mashups out there, we’ve scoured through hundreds to bring you our favorite useful and fun ones.